I expect the RBW book to serve as a companion to Crawford. As long long as the arrangement follows Crawford, the lack of an index shouldn't bother me too much.
The arrangement follows
Crawford exactly. Various rearrangements in NAC61/63 needed to be undone to achieve this (whew! a major piece of
work), for example the
aes grave and the gold (
Triton 3) were separated from the NAC61/63 sequence, and Roberto used NAC61 to explore various new arrangement ideas - these again have been undone so as to revert to proper
Crawford arrangement, however where such ideas were proposed by Roberto they have been replaced with text that synthesises those ideas, usually with added commentary by me to say what I think of them.
As for being a companion - yes, to expert collectors who would want both books given that RBW has countless more photographs than are shown in
RRC, and up to date commentary, and complements the text in
Crawford. But, for the
average collector, RBW plus
RSC1 (see my next comment) are all you will ever need. The few
types missing from RBW will be in
RSC1, and the latter serves as an
index to
Crawford numbers.
My only complaint, and it is a very small one, is that the RBW book does not have a table of contents, so if I wanted to look up a specific moneyer's coins, say, L. Sempronius Pitio, I'd have to know chronologically when his coins appeared. A moneyer-specific index might have solved this problem too.
Moneyer's
index: we didn't think a cross-reference from
Babelon was worth the pages it would take up: Crawford's
RRC does give such a concordance but it is 40 pages long (!!) and that would have added 10% or $15 to the cost of the book. The ever handy and inexpensive
Roman Silver Coins volume 1, by H.A.
Seaby (
still in print) follows the
Babelon arrangement and serves as such an
index. You can look up
Sempronia in
RSC1 (any printing from 1978 onwards) and it'll give the
Crawford numbers. I suspect it is very
rare that any owner of
Crawford RRC actually uses that 40 page concordance given that it's so much quicker to look up
RSC.
There are concordance tables from
Triton 3 / NAC61 / NAC63 to the RBW book.
I was just reading Vagi's article in Essays Russo .....
I'm glad
Nick commented on
Essays Russo. In all the discussion on
RBW I'd like to prompt a reminder for
Essays Russo, which is the real new research volume in contrast to the synthesised information within
RBW, by listing its contents
Essays Russo:Witschonke - Preface
Arturo
Russo - Biography of Roberto
Russo, a sample page below (note me in the picture!)
Rutter - Early Coinages of
Sicily,
Cyprus and
CreteBoehringer - Maestro della foglia
Campana - Emissione Siciliana a
nome di Hermas e
PanSantelli - Contromarche di
Zeus Eleutherio
Morcom -
Mint Sharing in Western
SicilyGitler - Samarian
types inspired by
AthensVagi - Rome's first
DidrachmBurnett - a Puzzling Early Roman Coin
McCabe - Anonymous Struck Bronze
Coinage of the Roman RepublicSchaefer - A Find from Campamento Ampurias
Pancotti -
Attis nella monetazione romana repubblicana
Russo - The Retariffing of the
Denarius (an important unpublished paper by Roberto)
Buttrey - Grammer and
History, Thoughts on
Republican coins
Witschonke - Unpublished
Roman Republican coins
Stannard - Quartered and
Countermarked Republican AssesWoytek - Unpublished
Denarius Hybrids, and the
Sestertius of Considius Paetus
Amandry - L.Atratinvs
Avgvr / Antonivs Imp
Kovacs -
Eusebeia, Civic bronzes
Travaini - Corrado IV